Is it time to start printing family photos again?
We all have a treasure trove of digital pictures sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Would it not be better to put them where people can see them, or send them to someone who would hang them with pride?
When I was young, my grandparents had a whole wall dedicated to photos of the grandkids growing up. It grew every year with new school pictures, but my favorites were the ones of the kids in their holiday best, beaming at the ceiling, probably because they had been promised a visit to Santa if they posed nicely.
Those were the pictures where you could see the family resemblance. A smile handed down through generations.
Winter is a good time to pick some and print them
Turn them into calendars, frame them properly, or put them in a keepsake album. You know the one, with the sticky pages, the faux leather cover and the clunky binder rings that eventually stop meeting. A beautifully coordinated album is also an option.
Family photos connect us to the people who came before
My parents are brown haired with darker eyes, and I ended up with Grandpa Bill’s blond hair and blue eyes. Genes are funny like that. The only reason we know what my grandfather looked like when he was young is the sheer number of pictures we have, running from black and white all the way through the color film revolution.
American Scientist has called this potential loss of a generation’s worth of photos and home movies the digital dark age. It is worth making the effort now, before it is too late.
Before photographs, you had to be painted
The urge to produce and preserve family pictures is a recent thing. Before photography the only way to get a portrait was to have one painted, and even if you could book them, Holbein and Gainsborough did not come cheap. That kept the practice to the very rich. Then came the 1850s, the photographic revolution, and Queen Victoria.
Victoria and Albert took to the new technology with roughly the enthusiasm teenagers have for social media, and every regal detail got recorded. When the middle classes saw it, they wanted in. Photographers opened up across the country and people paid heavily to be immortalized in sepia, because a portrait was still a slow and technical procedure.
Drawn from Michael Hewitt, “The Rise and Rise of Family Photographs”, The Guardian, 5 March 2011.
Now a family portrait can be whatever family you made for yourself
Go pose with Santa and your four best friends. It is a good way to spend a day, and meeting Santa is genuinely fun at any age.
Lean into what made 80s and 90s family portraits so great. Take a loud, funny photo with the cat, the dog, and every bit of hairspray and Christmas decor you can muster.
